The past weekend we spent with a group of students and their professors Ines Krasić, Mirjana Vodopija and Iva Ćurić from the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb in the idyllic village of Plemenitaš where they have one week of lectures and workshops on the topic of SOUND from different experts ranging from mathematicians and physicists to composers, musicians and artists. We are situated in the middle of this field of experts and presented our work and Empathy Swarm in the relaxed atmosphere of an outdoor evening lecture and a workshop “Machines in the Landscape of Plemenitaš” with one of our Psychophysics Machines: Megatautophone.

In a first step we sent the students out to record the sounds that express how they experience Plemenitaš, capturing the sounds of the scenery, ranging from cicadas, birds, bells of sheep to the rustling leaves in the wind. Then they could listen to their recordings through the directional speaker and learn how to modify the sound to improve it for the special nature of the directional speaker, applying high-pass and low-pass filters to get into the correct frequency range. To capture the results of the workshop and as a prototype for a series of “Machines in the Landscape”, we put the Megatautophone into the landscape, giving it the transformed sounds of the landscape as a language to communicate with its surroundings. We shot videos from different positions and used Zoom X/Y microphones next to the cameras to record this ‘dialog’ of the machine with the landscape. The videos and sounds need still to be combined and cut. We will present it soon!

Those first weeks of the residency with Kontejner have been very busy: meeting experts and new friends,
setting up our lab that we took with us from home to get the tool chain up and running again for the next generation of prototypes,
while prototype Kryten is the guinea pig for finalizing the PCB design and programming steering behaviors.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

Preparing for Izlog Festival and our Saturn3 Performance on 2nd May, 10:00 pm, we are experimenting with face-tracking and real time projections onto our faces.

Yesterday night we made some first tests, using infra-red light and a filter for visible light on the camera, to track the face and its landmarks in real time, while the projection was projected back onto the face, being visible for the human eye, but not for the special camera.

It’s a first idea of how it will be when the robots take over and transform Łukasz Szałankiewicz aka Zenial into one of them during the Saturn3 performance, synthesizing sound depending on his emotions.

Preparing for Izlog festival, we just set up our working space in the gallery: Electronics are spread out, visuals projected onto the walls, the 3D-printer is printing, a lot to do, but a coffee in the sun with everybody is a fantastic break from time to time. 🙂